Saurabh Govil, head of Wipro’s Human resources, in an exclusive interview to business standard dated May 11th answered various queries on Wipro Layoff plan. Please refer the link for more details on this exclusive interview

Business Standard : Is involuntary attrition across the board or that 10-15 years of experience level?Saurabh Govil : It is more (at that level) because as people grow old the ability to change is becoming lesser.

How you comment that the people with more experience find difficult to adapt to change? Do you know our honorable chairman is the most experienced person in Wipro?

Senior Wipro Employee:

How you comment that the people with more experience find difficult to adapt to change? Do you know our honorable chairman is the most experienced person in Wipro? Entire India and business world know, how his leadership transformed Wipro to the levels where we are here.

So do you think your perception is correct? In the new Donald Trump led administration, US wants more senior employees to be filled in H1B petitions as US wants senior employees to be placed in their country. Seniors come with experience and don’t you think, company is losing the experience with the current leadership perception.

Business Standard: A few Wipro employees say the company has initiated something called Band Inertia as part of the appraisal system. How does it work?Saurabh Govil: Some employees who have been in the same band for long and not been promoted. It is the first reflection of who you are. Some people got promoted in two years and there are people who are stuck in the same band for 7-8 years. The individual is not expecting to grow. If you are good, you go and get another job to get promoted somewhere else. There are some people who continue to be here (in the band), they are getting impacted.

Senior Employee:
Can you provide data points on how many people got promoted from B3-C1, C1-C2 and C2-D1 in the last 2 years. The main problem is if we have 1000 people in B3, only 50 people are promoted to C1 band every year. There are accounts in Wipro where promotion ratio is less than 2% year on year.

Saurabh Govil:
We have a programme where we are helping people through counselling face-to-face, online email, chat where we are helping people to understand this. We have also tied up with the agency to help outpace employees who are getting impacted; help you write your CV, help you do some online courses, how do you prepare yourself better for an interview. It is all about helping individuals to start fresh.

Senior Employee:
You could not have earned the collective disgust Wipro employees by any better way than this. Are you saying, Wipro employees with 15-20 years experience don’t know how to write their CVs. If this is the case, how we are running this organization and what will happen to the code written by them in the client place.

Who is the agency which Wipro has tied up for this initiative? How many days of this training program is planned. Don’t you know if you tell these sort of false statement, entire Wipro employees will laugh at you.

Saurabh Govil: I have so many engineering students ready to apply for BPO jobs, as they do not have a job

Senior Employee:
What you are trying to say here? There are so many people outside looking for jobs and they are ready to take BPO jobs due to unemployment issues. Can I take this answer as we are getting people at lower costs and we don’t want to pay higher salaries? Can I take that IT organizations are using this unemployment crisis to increase their profit revenues? If my understanding is correct, do you think this is correct ethic for company like us?

Our honorable chairman is the first Indian to sign up for The Giving Pledge, a campaign led by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, to encourage the wealthiest people to make a commitment to give most of their wealth to philanthropic causes. He started his own Azim Premji foundation and played significant contribution towards education in India. Does he know what is happening in the ground level? Why I am asking this query is, there is a mail circulated a few months before that bosses are the people who got the information last. So I wonder if our honorable chairman knows about these initiatives in Wipro.

Saurabh Govil:
Today, average attrition in the industry is nearly 15 per cent and this is voluntary. People are getting jobs, all companies are hiring, all companies are growing and in profits. We are good and we want to become better.

Senior Employee:
Our main complaint is Wipro is not terminating but force people to resign on their own. There are many press releases in last few years that Wipro is planning to ask people to leave. Here are my queries on this:

1) Do you report how many people are asked to leave in practice?
2) Why you are asking employees to submit resignation on their own when it is the company which wants them to leave?
3) Are these people shown as voluntary attrition cases or layoff cases in Wipro books and Labor records?
4) Are these people who are asked to leave paid any severance packages?
5) Did Wipro team checked with labor department or with legal team on what is the legal procedure for terminating employees?
6) Do you know as per law, if we ask employee to leave, company has to pay 15 days on average salary as severance package for every years of employee service? How much money is paid as severance package?
7) Did you give performance improvement plan for all employees who are asked to leave?
8) As per press releases, Wipro is providing multiple programs to upskill their performance. Is any such training provided for such people who are asked to leave?

We understand for business needs in certain scenario, asking people to leave is required. The only thing we are asking here is consider various parameters before asking employee to leave as these employees work for the organization for several years and not only got their bread and butter for themselves, but also for the organization.

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14 comments

If the IT industry approach like this way, it will leads to the parents to avoid their kids enter into IT studies and jobs. Consequently, there will be shortage of IT man power in the future.

If IT giants set retirement age at 40, then they should provide all the retirement benefits including pension similar to government sector. Since the IT resources contribution to modern human life in the recent decades are incomparable …and it paves the way for future digital world.

Mr. Saurabh Govil – If your focus is on digital why are you doing non digital business and assigning out dated work to employees and punishing them that they are not into digital. What is this strategy and how to continue with out dated work in hand. Your message convey that 95% scrap in the organization

Do we have any email I’d where I can forward some misdeeds of Wipro. This includes some voice mails and emails. There was one case we’re one resignation was made into involuntary exit and he was involved.

Wipro’s response is totally baseless and doesn’t answer to the point. Worst part is that they are screwing up appraisals deliberately and giving bad ratings and making it as a reason for sacking people. Terrible point to digest is that in spite of company asking employees to quit, they are not willing to provide experience letter. We have worked for the company for many long years with trust and loyalty. An# not issuing an experience letter is pathetic. Top level management is enjoying at the expense of hard work put in by mid and lower level employees

Wipro does not have any policy to protect employee from harassment / exploitation.
(In case you have such policy please share )

They used to hire science graduate and used to put pressure on Architect to enable then and in case junior resource are not able to perform then Architect used to get poor rating which is one kind of exploitation of architect.
Please let us know that why PM use to do appraisal of Architects.

Saurabh salary is more than 3.5 crores and he is one of the 150 people who are part of crorepathy list in Wipro. The interview shows his attitude and potential and Wipro fires him, they can backfill with 150 freshers. But sad part if Wipro fires these sort of people, he get 10 crores and fired as golden handshake. When normal employer is asked to go, they will be given 2 months notice as peanut and collapase the career

His response shows clearly Wipro is not giving respect to the people who worked hard to make this organisation at this level. His and his team’s only intention and motive is profit at the cost of employees life. Pathetic response for all the Qs.

People gave their life and health for an organization. Organization is generating revenue due to hard work of the employee …
Revenue and profit is growing due to efforts people are putting in , no customer pay unless he finds value for money. Forcing employees to resign is definitely wrong move. The strong bond between employee and employer is must for organizations success.

I am ex Wipro employee , Wipro is Violating the US H1B Rules and the managers and HR’S are supporting all this activity . They are asking employees to travel and work for multiple clients without H1B Amendment . Being an Wipro employee for last 8 years , I always feel proud that Wipro has strong policy and process . After raising this H1B Violation (HR :Usha Dantu ) who assured that action will taken against the culprits who are playing with employee career and US H1B Immigration Laws but after 2 weeks the salary was stopped by HR and my family Insurance was stopped . I was terminated from Wipro with the reason that employee don’t want to travel back to India but travel ticket were already raised and later HR told that Wipro Ombuds team is Investigating and I have to wait for the outcome but later Wipro Ombuds refuse to share the result .

This is how Wipro works and their management doing violation Federal laws , I will fight till end for the justice and all the culprits ( Srinivas Chamarthy ,Ramakanth Velichetti , Abhishek Agarwal , Kunderthi Shivendu & (HR ) Usha Dantu and summit Taneja and Sourabh Govil .

I reported this to EEOC (New Jersey ) and file a law suit against Wipro Management so that no new employee can be targeted , I was strong so that I was able to handle .